Sex and stickiness

The phenomenon is not unique to AME Info. For over a year, the BBC's story about a Sudanese man forced to marry a goat has regularly appeared in the site's most emailed stories.

Yahoo! Most Emailed stories is frequently topped by quirky sex-related news, and Yahoo!'s Most Viewed news pictures are generally 30% cute animals, 70% models in bikinis.

AME Info certainly doesn't court sex-related attention (though we have a casual bet going as to whether this article will make the day's most popular list). When we first introduced our most read story lists, the suggested title was "Today's Hot Stories", as the articles linked were the ones getting the most clicks and generating the most buzz.

Hot and sticky

But it was felt that "hot" was too sexy a term for a business information website. So instead the category became: "Today's Top Stories" - even though they aren't necessarily the top stories in terms of importance or editorial judgement.


Sex is admittedly very "sticky" in terms of web content. It not only gets people onto sites, it keeps them there. It brings them back. No wonder that sex is considered such a driver of new technology. As Peter Johnson notes in his essay "Why Not to Censor the Internet":

"Throughout the history of new media, from vernacular speech to movable type, to photography, to paperback books, to videotape, to cable and pay-TV, to "900" phone lines, to the French Minitel, to the Internet, to CD-ROMs and laser discs, pornography has shown technology the way."

Building sticky websites

But this isn't much help in much of the Arab world. Regional sites can't rely on sex and pornography to encourage internet and technology use, because these types of content are banned in most countries. In fact just researching this article was difficult, because the UAE blocked my attempts to Google "porn drives internet" and "internet porn statistics". I was forced to bypass the proxy to get the information I needed.

So how can one make a website sticky and sexy in a non-sexual way? Three ways. First interactivity: with features such as polls, forums and commenting. One of the reasons YouTube is so phenomenally popular is the sense of audience that its comment feature generates. Each video becomes a watercooler moment, with hundreds of users sharing their opinions, and asking and answering questions.

Photo-sharing site Flickr is as much about social networking as holiday snaps. Blogger is as much about heated discussions between readers as the wit and wisdom (or angst and anger) of the actual blog author. And give users a chance to pass on and share content on your website with "email this" links or the use of Technorati, Digg or Del.icio.us tags.

The power of the new

Secondly, currency: not in the sense of money but in the sense of always having fresh, up-to-date content. In the early days of the internet this was enormously labour intensive; now with custom feeds and third party add-ons such as stock-tickers and weather information it can be entirely automated.

The best thing is that you can create a news feed to exactly suit your site's target audience. Whenever they visit your site, they will see fresh headlines from around the world that relate to their interest/your industry. Even if the site visitor is aware that these are from third party sources, they still give your site a fresh feel, and it is useful for the visitor to see the headlines in one place. AME Info's Media Centre works like this.

You can also get third-party photo feeds that regularly update with new images. Blogging software can also be embedded into your site to make it easy for you to post regular updates. If you find relevant websites or articles, keep a regularly updated links list - this can also be done with a third party add on such as Blogrolling.com.

Be unique

Thirdly, uniqueness: put something on your site that no one else has. Or something else that no one has done well. This could be a FAQ or information pages related to your industry or specialisation. It might be tutorials or guides for relevant software.

It may even be a set of free desktop pictures - this is particularly relevant for those with travel and tourism websites, or auto-related sites. Or it could be a free application you have built, or a free cut-down version of the software that your company sells. Etailers can hand out discount vouchers and special offers to regular customers.

When people get something worthwhile for free it builds loyalty. They will be more likely to bookmark you, to return, to hunt around your site further and recommend it to their friends. And when you have something unique, you are more likely to rise up the Google hit rankings.

The risk of unstickiness

Above all, don't forget design. People don't stay around on sites that are poorly designed, whether in terms of visual attractiveness or poor usability. They want to feel welcomed and uplifted by a site, and they don't want it to frustrate them.

If they don't have a good experience, they won't come back regardless of how many sticky features you have put on there. The sheer simplicity of Google's search page compared to other search sites is believed to be a big part of its success: it looks clean and it loads instantly and is the easiest thing in the world to use.

Music, animated and heavy-to-load graphics, flash intros - all these are major turn-offs and the antithesis of sticky content. If you want to put music or video on, do it in a way that requires a user click to activate. Many people browse in the office and most people's instant reaction to a noisy website is to close the page rather than turn the volume down. Design expert Vincent Flanders of WebPagesThatSuck identifies "148 Mortal Sins That Will Send Your Site to Web Design Hell".

Flanders calls sticky content "heroin content". It's content that people will crawl through a sewer to get access too. It's the make or break for your website and possibly your business, if you are based online. And it is possible to get sticky without having sex.